This collaborative work between artist Otavio Schipper and musician Sergio Krakowski explores a dialogue between language and machines. Mechanical Unconscious investigates the telegraph, one of the earliest prototypes of modern computing, and Morse code, an analogue model for more complicated processing of languages.

Schipper and Krakowski have developed this composition to explore how the rhythmic content of spoken language manifests itself in technical structures. The focus is on how the machine approximates the rhythm of spoken language, as all sound can be measured and expressed in numbers. In this installation they aim find where the limits lie between language and pure rhythm, between poetry and subliminal sound waves.

Mechanical Unconscious is divided into a cycle of four nights and four days. Each night represents a different phase of the moon cycle (full moon, first quarter, etc.) During daylight hours, a recorded voice reads a text and causes a single light bulb to glow more intensely. As day turns to night, the telegraph begins to click, as if establishing a daily sonic ritual. Each night has its own landscape created from the varied sounds of phones and telegraphs. As the voice changes throughout the week, the telegraph analyzes it and responds with a new rhythm.

The text read each day is produced by automatic speech generators in a variety of voices, introducing an element of indeterminacy to the process. As the pitch and rhythm of the speech varies, the artist loses control over which information the machine will detect and how it will be processed into Morse code. This arrangement foregrounds the rigidity of mechanical language, set against the unpredictability of human speech. Translation is an incomplete science; there is no total control of the loop.There is a hint of nostalgia in Mechanical Unconscious, a nod to the Industrial Revolution and the dawn of the machine age, when simpler technologies more closely resembled the workings of the human mind. Perhaps the comparison flows both ways, and the brain is a machine for which we can unlock the computational processes that enable learning and perception. At what point does the machine begin to recognize itself? When does the machine become self-aware and feel its weight?